Wilfred Burchett:

EYEWITNESS

KAMPUCHEA |

By SEAN GRIFFIN

This year, for probably the first
time in his more than 40 decades as
-a journalist, Wilfred Burchett was
himself the subject and someone
else was doing the interviewing. For
~ several weeks, he travelled in Viet-
nam and Kampuchea (Cambodia)
and later in Japan, accompanied
by an Australian documentary film
crew completing work on a film on
his forty years as an international
journalist.

But on the road outside Phnom
Penh, the work on that film very
nearly cost him his life.

““We were returning May 7 from
a filming trip around the great lake
(in central Kampuchea),”’ he recalls
in an interview in Vancouver
Thursday, ‘‘and all of a sudden
there was a burst of automatic fire.

“The driver was hit with the first
burst — in fact, a bullet went right
through his cheek — but he kept

‘‘Then suddenly, a short
distance down theroad, there wasa
huge explosion and I thought: This
is the end. But still the driver was
able to keep going and finally
managed to drive us out of the am-

Belen down the road, the
crew finally reached a Vietnamese
military post where they stopped to
take refuge and to get medical at-
tention. That night, a Vietnamese
patrol combed the surrounding
countryside and rounded up a
group of about 20 commandos,
remnants of Pol Pot’s forces.

Under questioning, the prisoners
stated that the target of their am-
bush had been . . . Wilfred Bur-

chett.

week as part of a cross-country
tour, Burchett focuses his attention
on Kampuchea although his jour-
nalist’s trip from his home base in
Paris also included two weeks in
Kabul, capital of Afghanistan.

As he told reporters, ‘‘I lived in
Cambodia for four years, my wife
taught there and my children went
to school there.

‘I’ve supported the Cambodian
people for 25 years — in their most
difficult moments.”

He acknowledges that when he
first began to hear of the horrors of
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge govern-
ment, from refugees whom he in-
terviewed in Vietnam in the latter
part of 1978, ‘‘I couldn’t believe
it.”’

At the time, he was.a correspon-
dent for the New York Guardian
which, since 1970, had adopted a
Maoist editorial policy. But diring
the same trip — in 1978 — Burchett
travelled to the Vietnamese frontier
with China, at Lang Son, and saw
there the ominous signs of what
was to come two months later in
February, 1979 — the Chinese in-
vasion of Vietnam.

He sent his eyewitness account,
warning of the new threat to Viet-
nam, back to the Guardian in a
series of dispatches. Only days later
did he find out that the paper
hadn’t printed a single word. When

‘he discovered the blackout, he

phoned to resign, ending a long
association with the paper.

But if the break had not come
then, it would probably have come
in the spring of 1979, as Burchett,
able to get into Kampuchea follow-
ing the overthrow of Pol Pot by the
Kampuchean United Front for Na-
tional Salvation, began to write of
that country’s ordeal.

“The refugee camps near the Kampuchea-
Thailand border are a racket. Each of the
refugees represents an investment in for-
eign aid for those who control the camps.
And in many cases, the refugees are held in
the camps under terror.”

That the former dictator of
Kampuchea, the man who em-
barked on a genocidal ‘“‘experi-
ment’’ unequalled since the Nazis;
the man who still manages to main-
tain some military forces through
economic aid and financial support
from the west, would single out a
journalist as a target is a measure of
the standing that Burchett has had
in the liberation movements in
southeast Asia for a quarter of a
’ century.

In 1954, he entered Hanoi with
the liberation forces under Ho Chi
Minh and General Giap following
the historic defeat of the French at
Dien Bien Phu. A decade later, he
was among the first journalists to
expose the U.S. role in Vietnam
with his dispatches to various
newspapers and a book, The Fur-
tive War. He has written for scores
of newspapers and is the author of
several other books, including The
Second Indochina War, the subject
of which — the U.S. war in Cam-
bodia — still has haunting
reminders In the wake of Pol Pot’s
genocidal regime and the continued
support given Pol Pot by the U.S.
and the other western powers.

In Vancouver for three days last

He visited the country in May of
1979, returning again in August of
the same year and then again in
April and May of 1980. The long
association with the country and
his international renown enabled
him to gain an insight that few
other journalists could match —
and as he notes, his first impres-
sions were grim.

“‘T was depressed when I first vis-
ited in May, 1979,”’ he says, ‘I
doubted the very survival of the
Khmer people.” :

He underscores his point with
the figures gathered from his own
research and interviews. ‘‘Seventy-
three percent of the women in
Kampuchea are widows. In fact,
doctors from the aid organizations
who came in after Pol Pot’s over-
throw did spot checks of the
women and found that the over-
whelming majority of them were
sterile — from the physical and
psychological stress and the long
hours of hard work.”’ :

Later he tells an overflow audi-
ence in Vancouver’s Langara Aud-
itorium that, under Pol Poi, ‘‘the
women were even forbidden to
weep, for that was seen as a criti-
cism of the regime.

WILFRED BURCHETT ... scandalous that western governments
should continue to recognize Pol Pot.

“Tf they did,’’ he adds, ‘‘they -

would first be criticized and then,
perhaps a couple of days later, so-
meone would come and say “The
Angkar needs you.’ That would be
the end: the woman would be taken
to the forest and shot.”

(The Angkar was a term much
used by Pol Pot, symbolizing the
kind of ‘‘society”’ that he wanted to

establish which harked back to the .

centuries-old Angkar empire.)

He tells of a small centre near
Phnom Penh where the entire pop-
ulation was killed — except four
adults.

“One was an artist and one a
sculptor,”’ he relates. ‘They were
kept at work casting busts of Pol
Pot and painting his portraits.
Dozens and dozens of ‘portraits.
Pol Pot wanted to make himself
look as close as possible to Mao Ze-
dong (Mao Tse-tung).”’

In response to a question about
Pol Pot’s relation to China and
Mao he points out that Pol Pot vis-
ited China in 1965 where he became
“‘fascinated with the Cultural Rev-
olution, and continued close rela-
tions with the Chinese leaders.’’
Elsewhere he cites the book pub-
lished last year by Prince Sihanouk
in which he emphasized that the
“foreign policy of the Pol Pot-
IengSary (Pol Pot’s former foreign
minister) government. . . (was) al-
ways in fact in the tow of the Chi-
nese government.”’

He tells, too, of a man he inter-
viewed who told him of the annihi-
lation of the Cham people, rem-
nants of an old Moslem culture
from central Vietnam.

“‘Hetold me that the people were
gathered in a field supposedly to
discuss the problems of the Cham
people,’ Burchett relates. ‘But
suddenly the soldiers opened up on
them with mortars and machine
guns.”’

And there was the student he
met, now the curator of the Angkar
Wat temple ‘museum, who had
been a pupil of his wife’s when the
Burchetts lived in Cambodia from
1965 to 1969.

“‘T asked him if he knew of any
of the other students. He told me
that, as far as he knew, he was the
only one who had survived. He ad-
ded that none of the other teachers
were still alive.”’

The grim figures, the account of
the near destruction of a country.
and a people numbs the mind, re-
flecting what Burchett himself felt
on his first trip into Kampuchea a
year ago. But it was on his most re-
cent trip, this past April and May,
that he found Kampuchea begin-
ning to recover from the national
trauma — and the Heng Samrin
government beginning to rebuild
human society which Pol Pot had
come close to destroying.

a

BUN

=
=

“‘I was very heartened on my last
trip,”’ he relates, adding that other
observers as well are “‘struck by the
rapidity with which life is being re-
turned to some degree of nor-
malcy.

“The children are returning to

school — although there are few
teachers and the classroom is often
a field — and even the capital of
Phnom Penh, which Pol Pot had
completely depopulated is making
a fantastic comeback.”’

% His slides show a convoy of ox

. carts, going to Sisiphon near the

. Thailand border, to get seed rice.

¢

$ Headds that, a year ago, there were

few such scenes ‘‘and the expres-

S sions on people’s faces were only

anguish and apathy.”’

Burchett also interviewed Heng
Samrin, one of the leaders of the
Kampuchean United Front for Na-
tional Salvation which overthrew
Pol Pot, and now the president of
.Kampuchea. He asked him about
the priorities of the government,
expecting the answer to emphasize
“production and that ‘ort. of

“Instead Heng Samrin told me
that the first priority of the govern-
ment is to get families reunited and
society restored and to get villages
rebuilt. And that is clearly being
done,”’ he adds.

Significantly the rebuilding of
Kampuchea is being done, for the
most part, in spite of the western
countries, including Canada,
which have chanelled most of the
aid to the camps on the Kampu-
chea-Thai border. Worse, most of
those countries continue to give
diplomatic recognition to Pol Pot.

Burchett is outspoken in his con-
demnation on both these points.

“‘The refugee camps are a rack-
et,’’ he states, citing the interviews
heconducted with Jacques Donois,
the representative for UNICEF in
Bangkok, Thailand. ‘‘Each one of
the refugees represents an invest-
ment in foreign aid.’’

Most of the camps are maintain-
ed by one or another of the groups
which oppose the current govern-

& ment in Kampuchea, including the
= Khmer Serei (Free Khmer) headed

by Prince Sihanouk’s former prime
minister Son Sann and originally
founded and financed by the CIA.

Burchett*emphasizes that, even
though the government wants to
repatriate many refugees, ‘‘they are
held in the camps under terror.”’

In many cases, the refugees in
the camps are the wives and fam-
ilies of commando groups of Pol
Pot’s and others operating near the
Thai border. Since the camps are
also run by the same groups, the
threats of reprisals serve the dual
purpose of keeping the families in
the camp and keeping the com-
mando groups together.

“If a man tries to leave the com-
mando group,” Burchett explains,
‘this family in the camp is killed.”’

But he reserves his greatest con-
demnation for those governments
including the federal government,
which continue to recognize Pol
Pot despite the genocide and de-
spite the continuing terror sur-
rounding the refugee camps.

“Tt’s scandalous that Pol Pot
continues to receive recognition by
the UN and most western coun-
tries,”’ he says. ‘‘It is recognition
for a gang of murderers, of geno-
cidal murderers, who occupy no
territory in Kampuchea and, in
fact, have their bases in Thailand.’’-

He calls on people to ‘“‘put
pressure to bear on the government
to withdraw recognition of Pol Pot
and recognize the Heng Samrin
government which, he says, ‘‘clear-
ly meets all the normal criteria for
recognition.”

After more than 40 years at the
craft, Burchett still brings new vi-
tality to journalism. He is not only
a reporter — he is a voice to be
heard.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JUNE 13, 1980—Page 3